Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (33 page)

That week, wounded by his mother's pain and gloom, Chuckie had searched his mind for something he might do for her. His limbs heavy with fruitless love for her, he had stalked up and down and around their little sitting room until his eye fell upon one of those catalogues. He had leapt on it as he had used to fall upon them, passionately, convinced they would solve his problems.

He had spent almost an entire afternoon on the telephone. After some persuasion, the girl he spoke to chose to take him seriously. He told her to ring his bank. She did. Then, his heart filled with joy, he bought a book's worth.

For the first thirty or so pages as he and the girl on the phone leafed through the catalogue together, he merely bought every item. It was quicker that way. The girl persisted in slowing him down by carefully itemizing and pricing each item he chose but in the end he prevailed upon her simply to tick them. After a while, the buying of every thing on every page had proved patently absurd. By the time they got to the watches and jewellery, it would have involved buying his mother one hundred and fourteen watches, sixty-one of them men's. When they reached the sports section, although he knew that his mother would have little use for cricket bats and football boots, Chuckie still bought at least one thing from every single page.

It was an epic event. Towards the end, Chuckie could hear that the woman's colleagues had grouped around the telephone and were counting down the total and whooping in delight and encouragement. They had never seen such buying and when he ordered his last electronic personal organizer, with French and German translating sounded as though they were having a party. Chuckie asked the girl to give him the total cost. There were some minutes of keyboard tapping, then a pause.

`Forty-two thousand five hundred and twenty-eight pounds, fifty-two pence,' she said, awed.

`I'll send a cheque,' said Chuckie, with infinite brightness.

Now, he stood aghast as a series of overalled men began to dump endless brown cardboard boxes in the front room. They all shook their heads and laughed. One of them looked around the meagre space and mentioned that three sofas were coming in one of the later vans. Chuckie had forgotten that he had bought five. He had chosen five in case his mother didn't like the first, and also because several pages of the catalogue were devoted entirely to sofas and he had insisted on maintaining his item-a-page record.

As the unloading continued, Chuckie remembered that he had bought dozens of garments for her with no real sense of what size she might wear. He had bought countless pairs of men's shoes. He had bought exercise bikes, sunbeds, fishing rods, computer games. He had purchased car seat covers, cat baskets, televisions, electric guitars, dumb-bells and attache cases.

His heart sank as he remembered the part of the catalogue that had borne the brunt of his buying, the first forty pages. He rummaged desperately amongst the growing piles of boxes and found it. He opened the first forty pages. Women's underwear. He leafed through disconsolately. Black bustiers, frilly baby-doll nighties and high-thigh Lycra G-strings. He thought of his stunted middle-aged mother. He felt like crying.

Forty minutes later, the men had finished and Caroline Causton had come across the street to see Peggy. She was appalled but an irrepressible snort of laughter escaped through the hand she held to her face.

'What were you thinking of, Chuckie? Where's your sense? Peggy'11 have a fit.'

Chuckie mumbled some feeble apology.

'Try and clear some of it up and I'll go to your mum,' snapped Caroline briskly.

Chuckie watched her mount the stairs, shaking her head. He always felt superfluous in Caroline Causton's presence and he feared her disapproval greatly. As she disappeared into his mother's bedroom, he felt a momentary and additional qualm of jealousy.

He was preparing to return to the office when the doorbell rang again. It was growing monotonous. He answered it irritably, expecting more deliverymen. He was surprised to find Roche there. The boy stood looking at him, a ragged bunch of flowers in his hand. Chuckie did not invite him in.

`She got them?' he enquired dubiously of the besmirched gamin.

`Nah'

`Why not?ff

`She wasn't there.!

'No?

`No:

Chuckie considered. He had never known Max miss a day at the nursery. He would call her at home before he left for the office.

`Where's my change?' he asked the boy.

'What change?'

`You're not going to tell me that you spent fifty quid on those?' Chuckie pointed to the listless bunch of carnations in the boy's hand.

'I had more. But I, ah, lost them.'

`What?'

`Yeah, I was chased by a flock of swans and I dropped them.'

`What?'

`Aye, big fuckers.'

'In Belfast?'

`You calling me a liar, fatso?'

'Go away,' said Chuckie hopelessly.

He closed the door on Roche and called Max's flat. There was no answer. He called Aoirghe at work. `Lurgan?' She sounded annoyed.

'Why can't you call me Chuckie?'

`What do you want?'

'Where's Max? I tried her at work and at the flat.'

There was a pause. When she spoke again, her voice was softer than he had heard it hitherto. `Look, Chuckie, Max has gone.

'Gone? Where?'

`Home.!

'I told you. I called her there.!

'No, I mean home. Back to America.'

'What?'

`She left last night, Chuckie. She told me not to say anything. She's sent you a letter.'

'What's going on?' asked Chuckie angrily.

Aoirghe told him. She nearly seemed to enjoy it.

He had only seen Max once during that week. She had been understanding and sympathetic about his mum. She didn't mind his absence while Peggy was upset or ill. Indeed, she had been so sympathetic that she had even visited his mother a couple of nights ago. Chuckie had been filled with desire when he saw her in all her warm brown healthy flesh, but she had spent almost the entire visit upstairs with his mother and he had felt himself excluded in a very definite manner. When she left, her face had been strange and her kisses uncharacteristically diffident.

For some, almost mystical, reason he could not quite grasp, he had feared that some great event had taken place upstairs with his damaged mother. When he had seen Peggy later, her face had been as strange and muted as Max's. He wondered what they had talked about.

They had spoken on the telephone subsequently. There had been a detachment in Max's words that the newly sensitive Chuckie had attributed to awkward kindness. She had told him that she was tired of violence following her around. She had left America with many people she knew violently dead and now it looked like Belfast was going to be the same. Chuckie had been disturbed by this notion but, in the end, he had decided there was nothing about which he should be anxious.

It was not as though he had given her no thought. Occupied by his mother as he was, Chuckie had dreamed of Max constantly. In these reveries, there was something besides his usual sensual gratitude. In the grip of his changing feelings about his mother, Chuckie found himself concluding that he felt larger things for this American girl than he could easily accommodate, fat though he was.

He hung up on Aoirghe without saying goodbye.

Nine o'clock that night, Chuckie was in the Wigwam with the boys. They were talking about the fact that the IRA had just issued violent threats against the unknown OTG movement. The IRA had been slow to call in their claim for the Fountain Street bombing (no one knew that this was caused by the number of vandalized phone boxes in the Moyard area). In the interim, a rumour began and circulated for some hours that the OTG might have been responsible for the outrage. Such rumours were quick to gain the currency of fact in Northern Ireland.The IRA, justly peeved, had now made its feelings clear. Chuckie knew that some of this was his fault, after the threats against Crab and Hally, but he had buried the memory with the ease he would have shown with a sexual mishap, a failed erection. Besides, unlike his friends, he had other things to think about.

`You're quiet,' said Jake, looking at Chuckie.

`Yeah,' he mumbled.

`Your mum's going to be OK, said Jake gently.

The general conversation ceased and the four young men tried to avoid looking sympathetically at their fat friend. There were a few coughs, and beers were slurped.

`It's not that,' Chuckie said.

`What is it?' asked Slat.

Chuckie told them about Max.

He was surprised to find how good it felt to tell them and how good it felt that they listened. He was surprised at the unanimity of their subsequent advice. Go after her, they all said. Follow her.You'll never find another like that.

It seemed absurd at first but, gradually, they talked him into considering it. Even Septic stopped watching women and joined in the general encouragement. Chuckie felt his eyes grow hot and prickly. He had never felt so liked.

`What about my old lady?' he asked.

`We'll look after her,' said Slat enthusiastically. `She'll be all right.'

The others murmured uneasy assent. Chuckie considered their proposal.

Ten hours later, Chuckie sat uneasily in the window seat of the fifteenth row of an aeroplane as it taxied into take-off position. He had rushed everything through. Luke had obtained a passport for him a couple of weeks before, believing multitudes of international money-making flights to be imminent. Jake had helped him out, booking the flight, driving him to the airport in Chuckle's own fat Mercedes, of which he had graciously granted Jake the use while he was away. Hesitantly, Chuckie had asked Jake to look after his mother in combination with Caroline Causton. He had thought long and hard about whom he would ask from amongst his friends. Caroline Causton would be around more or less permanently but he wanted something extra. Septic was not an option, Donal was often foolish. Slat seemed the obvious was gentle, good with women, the all-round socialist paragon. But there was something about Jake he had always trusted. And Jake said he would be glad to keep an eye on Peggy.

When he had guiltily told his mother what he proposed to do, he had been surprised by her reaction. Her face had shown a brief but unmistakable flicker of interest. Encouraged by this, he told her that he hated to leave her and that he would be back as soon as he could but that he felt he had to go.

`Good for you,' his mother had said distinctly, before closing her eyes and turning her face to the wall.

He spent a sleepless night, tortured by the necessity of following Max and abandoning his mother. He was torn between two sets of that's what he could now call them both. One he knew he could never lose: his mother, he felt now, without asking, would always love him. But Max might not have even begun to consider that possibility. He knew that, in some epic transatlantic way, he had to offer her that option.

As dawn approached, he racked his memory for details and venues from the life story that Max had told him. Phoenix. Miami. San Diego. New York. Hopelessly, he mapped out his search in his head.

That morning, as he had packed and waited bleary-eyed for Jake, he had looked around No. 42 in a guilty daze. All of the mail-order goods had now arrived. Jake and Caroline had already taken a sofa each but that left three. Aoirghe had promised to take another and Jake had suggested Oxfam for some of the rest of the stuff, but the mess in the house was nightmarish. It made him want to cry. It looked absurd, chaotic. It was typical. It looked just like him. It looked like all his clumsy love.

Seatbelt fastened, laces loosened, stationary on the tarmac, Chuckie remembered that he had never flown before. He was gripped by momentary provincial prole panic. He felt a light, almost fashionable perspiration on his face. Take-off, he was told, would be delayed fifteen minutes. Which, he felt, made it worse. As he thought about the take-off and the seven airborne hours ahead of him, he prayed that he would neither disgrace nor wet himself.

But Chuckie need not have worried. The Chuckieness in him meant that within five minutes he was asleep, and by the time the plane was taking off, he was open-mouthed and drooling, small chuffing noises not quite snores escaping from his nose and mouth. Chuckie drooled and chuffed all the way to America.

All along the street, sirens wailed and horns blared. Constant streams of people with hard faces joined the street from the spilling mouth of Broadway. Chuckle shuffled and dodged against the adamant flow of citizens. Small-town boy, he tried glancing at every face he passed. Those faces were keen as the wind, they were tight with tension and time.

The pavements reverberated under their sharp heels like drums or thunder. Chuckie, Belfast-born and Belfast-bred, had always delighted in lording it over yokels from the dark interior of Northern Ireland. If you were from Lurgan, Enniskillen, Omagh or Dungiven, Chuckie Lurgan would become the ultimate in urban, the complete cosmopolite. But now, as Manhattan walked and drove past him, Chuckie Lurgan was terrified.

He expected every face he saw or could not see to do him some form of big-city harm. He waited for someone to pull a gun or a blade. The constant sirens made him walk twitchily, with the delicacy and strangeness of a soldier patrolling no man's land. He was used to the traditions of Belfast brutality and gunplay but New Yorkers looked like they would all do it to you. They'd do it casually, quickly, and they'd enjoy it. Even the women looked terrifying. The women, especially, looked terrifying.